“I like peace,” she said.
“Who doesn’t?” He escorted her to the Jeep.
They drove across the beauty gruel with no horizon. At their vehicle, the guide left Val and drove Vivienne on further into the nuclear land. There were no outskirts here, everything seemed like an inskirt. Where did you put things, if there were no corners? Did infinite space make you fill the air with conspiracies?
“Come on, Miss Curious,” the guide said. “I want you to see something.”
The mountains looked to be a fifteen-to-twenty-minute drive away. “How far is that?” asked Vivienne, motioning with her camera, putting it up to her eye, shooting.
“That? Where they set off the Stokes test? That’s a good day’s drive, ma’am.”
“You’re talking eight hours,” she said.
“I am talking thirty-six hours, ma’am,” the nuclear site guide said. “At a minimum.”
So. They were driving a flat land where you could see clearly one thousand miles away. You could see from Toronto to Gainesville, Florida, with everything that existed gone. The mind could not comprehend this. But the eye, the reception desk of the body, could see it. Vivienne felt her eye shape-shifting. The desert forced a different order of seeing. A balloon that looked to be a one- or two-minute drive away sat with its nose pointed skyward. “How high is that? How tall?” Vivienne asked. “Ten stories?” She couldn’t get all of the nose-coned balloon into her lens. They must be close by now, but the land kept rolling away. She felt panic. She could not see the edges of anything. The world could have disappeared and she would not know it. Nobody would know it.
“The balloon?” the guide asked. “That, ma’am, I am proud to say is higher than the Twin Towers. Ah, I mean than they were. We have maintained it in its original state since the test, quite a success. Men come out and check on her on a daily basis. Proud to say no harm has come to the old girl since ’57.”
They drove an hour by Vivienne’s watch. The balloon ahead was no closer. Inside her lens the proportion of land and the vertical balloon on the massive horizon stayed the same. As they drove closer to it, it got further away. Tiny black sticks in a row stood to the right of the balloon. One, two, four, five, six, maybe fifteen black sticks on the white plain. The Jeep stopped.
Vivienne held up her thumb. The sticks were the height of the white of her thumbnail. She held up her hand. The balloon was the height of her hand, about one hundred fifty times taller than the black sticks. It was grey. It looked like an art project by Christo, like a grey billowing draping over a building. You could pull the drape off and there would be one shining tower in a land with no corners. Vivienne felt more panicked, and took more pictures.
“We met and matched Hiroshima with this one,” the guide said. “They changed the name I am proud to say of that range, gave it due respect, named it Stokes Range. The Stokes test was all of nineteen kilotons. Not our biggest by far. Still Hiroshima was only fifteen kilotons.”
“You set off a bomb bigger than Hiroshima, here in Nevada?” She knew the answer of course, she knew all about it, but as with Andy back in the valley, she liked to see the face of a man when he thought she was less informed than she was. She could play “little lady” if it got her the picture. Dumb redhead.
“Ma’am,” he said. Giving her the look she wanted. Smart white guy, in shape, late sixties, giving her an expansive smile, the kind that welcomes you while keeping you at a distance. Warm, wary, playing that game. That was okay. Her camera around her neck had made her a life-long bluffer. Her camera was up for anything, it lead her, taught her, mentored her, was her lens-sensitive sensei, a gamer. “Ma’am, have you ever heard of Hood?”
“Hood?” she asked.
His eyes came into his smile now. It was not a fake smile; it was an authentic smile of authentic male condescension. Open, friendly, welcoming, très American. Looking at her like she’s the cute polite Canadian doll. “The stories I could tell you,” he said.
She got an excellent shot of his face, the test balloon in the background, his head large against a white shining plain. Weathered, getting leathery in the sere air. The insides of her eyelids felt scratchy. The sky was ten times the height of the land.
“I would love to hear them,” she said. “I’ve got nothing but time.”
“I signed papers. No can do. It’s public information that Hood was seventy-four kilotons, five times the power of Little Boy.”
“Little Boy? You mean Hiroshima.”
“That’s right, ma’am. I had a feeling you knew more than you were letting on. You probably know all about Operation Plumbbob, summer of ’57, we exploded twenty-nine bombs, twenty-seven had nuclear yield. The busy time was June, July. Priscilla yielded thirty-seven kilotons, eleven days later Hood, ten days after that was Diablo, yield seventeen kilotons.”
Vivienne was looking at the something going on in his eyes. She lifted her camera and he gave her a hazel-eyed half-squint that could kill a deer at one thousand feet. Tough chin, hollows under that scary squint. “Hood,” he said. “I flew a helicopter through the cloud to pick up evidence. You could say we were atomic CSIs. Nineteen of us.”
“Nineteen men?”
“Nineteen birds, checking out how bad it was. I was just a pup. Eighteen years old. They never told us we were part of the experiment.” He looked around. In a land this vast with no people you felt more paranoid someone had overheard you than in a city restaurant sitting on communal benches. He looked up to the sky. “No one had any idea in those days. We were going in to check on the test results. See what was happening with the detonation. You’re married to the weather reports, ma’am, when you’re setting off five Hiroshimas.”
His hazel eyes were streaked with amber. Out here, the sun forced an intimacy with men’s eyes.
The nuclear guide looked over the Jeep’s windshield to the hours-away balloon. Vivienne opened the passenger door with her right hand behind her back, holding the camera in her left hand, stepping down, praying it was solid ground, and it was. He didn’t mind, or at least say anything. He looked ahead. Good. Excellent.
Vivienne walked backwards, not looking behind her, hoping she wasn’t backing into anything. The chances were slim. There was seriously nothing here, unless she walked two days backwards and hit one long snarly dwarf tree. She kept walking backwards hoping for the shot she had been feeling. She wanted the balloon like a mystery and the tiny stick people beside it to be in the right of the frame like a thing the viewer would look at and wonder “What in the hell is that?” And the guide, a serious military man, with coyote eyes and a stern companionability, he was a guy you wanted to be seated next to on a train. The first hour or so you did not trust him or like him, but you had a long ride ahead and soon you got into coded confidences and good bourbon.
He did not shift his lower torso. Good.
He moved his upper torso around. Vivienne took a chance: she motioned to him, pointing to her chest, wordless, and he got it. He tipped his upper torso towards her. She put her hand under her chin. He lifted his chin. She took her first two fingers and pointed them at her own eyes. He gave her more with his eyes – if that was possible – and she had him in her scope, she could hear the photograph now. He stared her down like an equal. He was confiding the surface. He was working fast, like a pro. Putting his body into his angles, his look.
There were way too many slow-moving shutterbugs obstructing the landscape today as far as Vivienne was concerned. The sight of a camera in their hands made them feel famous. Being near a camera made an untrained person feel the way a fan might feel near a famous person. As if the machine itself was a raja or a king or a VIP or a talent scout or God’s representative. As if the machine itself were fame, forgetting that in all of Earth’s history, photography is still a baby, in its marvel baby steps, a mere one hundred sixty, one hundred seventy years old. And when photography was much younger, about age ninety-nine, after the Americans dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, they sent sold
iers out in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to confiscate cameras and film. Also to make sure no one was taking pictures in Iwo Jima, because it was the place from which the B-29s carried the bombs to these places. The story is told that the Americans fought at Iwo Jima in order to secure it as a portal for their atomic bomb planes.
Vivienne snapped six shots of the guide, at a nice easygoing speed of 1/60th of a second each. She nodded, and he pulled out a pack of smokes. Three Castles. He cupped his hands in the wind behind the windshield. A body memory of Andy in the hotel room came back to her. He had cupped his hands just this way. Sand came up in the wind and was blowing hard at them. This changed the game, it was sandstorm time. The balloon became a ghost balloon, a grey tower in front of which the fierce cheer of the blue day became dust in visible air. The human black sticks were now sketchy, the air in the lens looked like fog made of gold granules. The wind percussed sand into the windshield. The guide kept looking in profile at the far balloon, he kept smoking, she got a marvellous shot of him. Without a caption, what does the shot say? Who was this man? What was he looking at? Why is he sitting alone in a Jeep, smoking a cigarette as an amber sand cloud pours over his body?
A man wrapped in sand inside a Jeep wrapped in sand, with a white cigarette caught by a shaft of light from below. The picture had mystery, she knew it as she took it. What had stepped out of the frame right before the shot was taken?
The atomic bomb had stepped out of the frame. The man in the gold and white sandstorm caftan was looking at fifty years of history.
He was an atomic war veteran. The picture didn’t say this. But like rain or sand it informed the entire photo. He had told her his story, and that informed her arms; she had listened to him, and that informed his eyes. This was why you went, whole, to the broken places, and became part of them. You made things, and then art became your oasis. Vivienne felt the old feeling: I am alive in the world, the world is full of fascination. I came from desert people. I am a Semite. I have desert genes. And it is told: once, in a story, men packed out spices and journeyed in long darkness in indigo robes and gold-embroidered coats across the sand of the desert, seeing tessellations and polygon sunsets. Once, they walked in an exodus across the desert and they did not have cameras. This capture is our new bauble, our new treasure.
She felt for the first time in a long time her intention: to create the feeling of sanctuary in a viewer who might be wandering lost, and who might come across a photograph of hers, and find it became his heart oasis, even in passing.
She got back in the Jeep. “Done?” the guide asked.
“For now,” Vivienne said.
He turned out on the white plain where a set of whiter lines marked a road. She was being driven into the heart of lightness. “That pay money?” the guide asked, leaning his head towards her camera.
“Some,” she said. “I have eight books out. Enough to pay for my garden habit.”
“I have to say I enjoyed the one about the surf squatters in the Canaries. I used to do a serious amount of surfing myself in the San Diego days. I guess I am just not cut out for one-legged surfing. Buddy of mine used to surf there in the Big Canary. Fine Atlantic breaks.”
So, he had seen one of her books. Surf Squats, from that winter in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, when she had lived in a crumbling squat painted turquoise, on a hill above the beach, in the days before they pulled the eyehole-windowed squats down and put up fancy condos where ex-pats were more fat than surfing and the view was great, but the dispossessed who surfed in rags with makeshift wood were exiled. So, he knew who she was. Of course. Today, someone announced your name at a gate and the man in the hut had your entire history before you arrived. These were the small powers given to men, now that they were not setting off Nagasaki, Nevada. But this man had served; his lungs and brain had served and been degraded with honour. So where was he taking her? The land went on and changed to time and time changed to space. How had it happened that Einstein took the theory of relativity and its endgame was the death of so many Japanese? Who knew that the desert would be seen as homeless, to be set on fire, to be left scarred and burned? And so did science rage its genius.
13
A SINGLE MUTANT SHEPHERD
JOHNNY COMA WALKED further into the space that kept opening.
A small runty animal approached him. It looked like a sheep, a shorn ewe. An object, like an inside organ lay on the ewe’s side. Johnny came closer. The sheep’s heart had grown outside its body. He put his hand on the ewe’s heart, and indeed it beat outside its body. Another came, wearing lungs up at its neck.
He walked further, the ewe with the exterior heart trailing him, like a single mutant shepherd of humans.
Ahead Johnny Coma saw a small mountain of bones covered with large vehicular wheels. The cadaver of a Jeep was somehow placed atop the unnamed bone mountain.
The land seemed like the physical manifestation of an unslept world. Sleep disruption, disrupted brainwaves. Your rawness, your fears were the physical materials of mountains, sky, rock, dirt.
Inner space had been made outer space by the radioactive fallout, the sick gift that keeps on giving.
Remember when nobody had cancer? Remember when cancer was rare? Remember how when we were growing up everybody had a relative, a distant aunt, a person in the neighbourhood, who had cancer? How is it that today everybody has cancer? How our hearts would dissolve if we thought: To keep the Russians away, we destroyed a North American generation’s health. We set the world on fire, and put young heads in the nuclear atmospheric oven.
Remember when brain cancer was rare? Remember when you went to your first funeral for someone with brain cancer, so long ago, so rare? And the bureaucrats and the technocrats and the true nuclear believers did not escape the air, either. They too have deformed grandchildren, they too have lost count of the funerals of their colleagues with cancers and they too lie in their tumorous stained soil in pine.
Johnny walked across the windy cratered land. It was a dried mud and pathology museum. The Earth was a blue tumour in space, too marvellous for words. And the small woolly ewes walked to him in their flocks, born with no wool and their hearts beating, unlike symbols but like ruin, outside their bodies.
14
NUCLEAR PHARAOHS
IN THE DESERT, men set up desks, as men like to do, to receive the data. The hunter-gatherers of the nuclear data came to the desk with their cloud samples, and the men in suits in their open-air offices looked at the clouds on the desks, and other men came with the burned retinas of rabbits. The data men counted the retinas and the cloud noshes, and made neat charts of the atomic fallout. Other men gathered the sheep from trenches and the sheep tied to stakes in the open. It was quite an inbox: rabbit eyes, radioactive cloud samples and sheep still on the stake. To the paranoid, this is all logical self-defence. Keep in mind the paranoid man is the hero of his own story.
They set off multiple atomic and hydrogen bombs in the glory months of June and July. When the heat was scorching before the fireball came, when the nuclear workers’ bodies were under severe pressure anyway, even if it were a day off from playing God’s servants, or at least the servants of the Nuclear Pharaohs.
The nuclear workers had to don big heavy hazmat suits to examine the pieces of the experimental houses that had been blown off in the bomb tests to see what would happen to houses in bomb time. These workers did not wear hazmat suits as they watched the tests. They put them on after. They examined the highly radioactive houses: the doors, the roofing, the driveways, the parked radioactive vehicles. They examined the sheep that had been bound and set in foxholes, the pigs that had been incarcerated in cages and the cattle placed out on the nuclear range.
But the men whose job it was to tend the test animals, to examine the animals, to brush the radioactive dust off the animals, to exfoliate the hides of the animals or to cut the animals up, these men also most profoundly suffered the blowback, the fiery balls, the dust, dirt, poison. They too
became atomic veterans. The chart makers, the cloud pilots, the men at desert desks, the men setting up the living-room mannequins and picking up the dummy families later, they too were in the tests. We tell ourselves the story that the scientist in the lab is not the rat in the cage. But bomb tests are the lab experiment where the scientist and the assistant are inside the cage, also. You can’t escape this world you live in. They too lived in the mutations of air; the mutant sky on fire lives above us still, in its own keloidal scars we might call sunsets. Yes, and the photographers too. Just as a reporter in war is in that war, so the scientists and photographers and seismic graph men were also poisoned. Original child atom begat the atom generations.
You can’t think your way out of the nuclear age. This is the new sick womb we are born in. Our skin has gone inside us, to come up like stealth attacks from invisible hideouts.
The pilots, yes, were told the nuclear clouds were safe to fly their data-collecting planes through. Those men became sick. The words chosen were test and safe. But a man’s body does not know whether the tumour growing inside him came from a test or the real thing, because a test is the real thing. Calling a nuclear blast a test is the way humans use words for inept magic.
They put men out in the blistering desert on dry crackling days, over 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the midday sun’s burn, and asked them to observe the test of a bomb. The air started at 110 degrees, which meant the ground temperature could be 135 degrees, or the air started at 135 degrees which meant the ground could be over 200 degrees. That was before the bomb. In the desert on a summer’s day, you can get third-degree burns with bare feet on the ground, hiking. You began at third-degree burns and heatstroke, and then they set off the bomb and rushed to see how the fake house doors were doing.
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